I could've sworn I did a review for Zodiac back when I saw it in theaters, but apparently not.

I've been waiting for the DVD for a month, with a huge itch to watch it again. I also had this itch for about a week after my initial viewing.

The movie opened with fair-to-good reviews, clocking a 77 at MetaCritic and 78% CotC at RottenTomatoes.

I hate using the word 'fan,' but I've been a David Fincher 'fan' for years. Seven, Panic Room, Fight Club, and even The Game were all very well-made movies. Fincher has a very distinctive style, mixing traditional technique with an apparent love for personal flare. And this, with the cinematography, meshes well to give a fantastic feel of the 60s, and eventually spanning all the way until 1991.

There's also the overwhelming superscripts on every scene, which skips the step of inserting a timeline through subtle measures and just getting it up front. Four years or ten hours, it's all shown in a quick note (except for one great shot showing a skyscraper being constructed over a year). The feel of investigatory reminds me a lot of All the President's Men... though slightly different subject matter. Very different movies, but I just got that feel. And that's a good thing.

But the real thing is, what ties the movie together? This isn't a spoiler: the Zodiac murders were never solved. It takes a lot of talent to pull off closure when there's no certain evidence, no verdict. It's all circumstantial. There's no PROOF. Some say that's where the movie falls flat. That's why the movie thrives, is because the movie is about the Zodiac killer, but the real motif is addiction. Zodiac is just the string that holds the movie together.

We'll see how things go come Oscar time. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe a few tech nods will come up. I have a feeling, though, in five, maybe ten years, this movie will be looked upon as 'great.' We'll see.

Rating: 7/7

(And there is a reason I picked a 7 point rating system. Explaining it would just be a bunch of convoluted run-on sentences, so I won't, but just trust me that it makes sense.)